


devil in the details

by brophigenia



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Canonical Character Death, Crossroads Deals & Demons, Declan as Michael, Demon Deals, Jiang as Lucifer, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:42:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26958250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brophigenia/pseuds/brophigenia
Summary: “It’s going to be okay,” he told Kavinsky,K,and licked his own blood from the boy’s teeth. “I’ll help you.”(AKA, Jiang is the devil.)
Relationships: Jiang/Declan Lynch, Jiang/Joseph Kavinsky/Prokopenko/Skov/Swan
Comments: 6
Kudos: 34





	devil in the details

**Author's Note:**

> 10 points to whoever guesses the identity of Jiang/Lucifer's past meatsuit.

_ i am going to build a new boyfriend _

_ out of garbage and dirty feathers _

_ and nobody will touch him.  _

_ *** _

Jiang’s hands were never jittery. 

They were perfectly-formed, square-palmed and long-fingered, nails immaculately manicured. Not a single scratch, loose cuticle, nor callus. 

This amused Swan, later, when he knew what Jiang was. Or, what  _ part  _ of Jiang was. 

_ (Idle hands are the devil’s playground,  _ as his gram always said, though they lived in a manor house with a dozen servants. The devil was everywhere. His playground was endless among the aristocracy.) 

K was a fey thing, already-damned by the time Jiang met him (or… met him  _ again,  _ though he’d appeared in a different form the first time) in Henrietta. There was blood on his hands that Jiang could smell, could hear, could nearly  _ taste.  _ A murderer among the ranks of the Aglionby Raven Boys. This, in itself, was not as rare as one might believe- a few of the other boys had killed, and at least one faculty member, but none dripped with the same kind of desperation that Joseph Kavinsky did. 

He made a good show of it, but Kavinsky was not the same as the other boys— he was swerving in and out of mania, out of control, unable to fucking  _ breathe  _ without thinking about death. It hung over him like a shroud. 

He was the most beautiful thing Jiang had seen in  _ years.  _ Centuries, maybe, since he was a golden-haired girl named Lucrezia, staring down at another out-of-control prince who thought of nothing but darkness. 

_ Brother,  _ he had entreated then in lilting Valencian, their shared language, feeling the thick ridge of arousal pinned beneath the endless layers of his skirts.  _ Tell me what ails you.  _

Now, Jiang pinned Kavinsky to a white-tiled bathroom wall and spat blood in his face, both their knuckles split open and their uniforms torn. “What the fuck is  _ wrong  _ with you?” He swore, low, in English and Bulgarian and Italian and Latin and the celestial reverberation of the angels he’d once called  _ kin.  _

The language did not matter, nor the words, but the  _ sentiment.  _

“I killed my father,” K said back, the words tumbling from his split lips so fast they could not have been stopped by anyone or anything. “I dream and I wake up and there are  _ things  _ there. I killed my father and I dreamt up a new one. I can’t stop taking drugs. I can’t stop drinking. All I can think about is I’m gonna get caught and they’re all gonna  _ know  _ that I’m a freak and a murderer and—“ 

It was enough. K’s eyes were wide and horror-stricken. Jiang nearly purred with it, pleased to his (temporary) bones. The panic in the air was like the finest perfume, an orgasmic miasma of olfactory satisfaction. 

“It’s going to be okay,” he told Kavinsky,  _ K,  _ and licked his own blood from the boy’s teeth. “I’ll help you.” 

And so he had, lounging around, giving instructions and advice to K in a languid tone that belied K’s obedience, sinking into the background to let K’s bright chaos burn like a bonfire, blazing through the sleepy-eyed streets of Henrietta. 

He’d followed in his own fast car as K raced recklessly through the streets, eyes watchful, hellfire always on his heels. 

He’d watched K cradle the lifeless body of his oldest, most devoted,  _ only  _ friend, knelt in a ditch by the side of some nameless county road, next to the smoking wreckage of what had once been a moon-pale six-cylinder death trap, and known that it was  _ time.  _

“What if I made this better?” He asked, too-calm for the horror. Too-calm to be staring down at Ilya Prokopenko’s half-charred body. Musing, almost, and K in his hysteria seemed not to hear him for such a long, long time. 

Jiang didn’t repeat himself— that was not how this went. He had one chance, and one chance only. 

(There were  _ rules,  _ even for a long-fallen angel.) 

The morning was breaking before K answered, voice hoarse like he’d been swallowing rusty nails for kicks. The sun was a pale circle behind the fog and the clouds, a star among the dawn light. 

“Please,” K begged, weak on the outside in a way that finally matched how he felt on the inside. Weak as a child. Begging like one, too. 

It was nectar and ambrosia, both, to Jiang. 

“A year,” Jiang said, and flashed a quicksilver grin that was utterly, entirely inhuman. “Twelve months. Fifty-two weeks. Three hundred and sixty-five days.” 

Once, he’d appeared as a horned animal on two legs, bearing a leatherbound book to be signed in blood. 

It had been what was expected of him— the people back then had such narrow minds. They believed that they could only sign away their souls to their own version of the devil. 

Thankfully, Jiang had found, millennials were much more willing to sign away their souls to a handsome face than they would’ve been to some special-effects horror movie prop gone wrong. 

K had grown up kneeling in pews and paying lip service to the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ. There was a bell ringing in his chest even as he nodded, agreeing to Jiang’s terms. A bell that could not be unrung. 

K woke up the next morning in his own bed, Prokopenko whole and brand-new wrapped around him, his car perfectly intact and parked haphazardly on his front lawn in direct violation of the HOA terms of agreement. 

It was a dream, K told himself, though he could feel the sand slipping through the hourglass. Though he knew that Prokopenko was  _ not right.  _

_ Everything _ was a dream. Nothing was real. K comforted himself with delusions of grandeur about his own power, derived from being distantly related to creatures who had long-ago disappeared beneath the hills, never again to be seen. 

There would be no respite, no reprieve. Three hundred and sixty four days remained. K woke up on July 5th as a dead man, and wouldn’t even acknowledge the fact. 

_ Teenagers,  _ Jiang scoffed inwardly, moving on to his next prey. 

In a town like Henrietta, there was a lot to choose from. Jiang stayed well enough away from the fey women of 300 Fox Way, out of their keen eyesight, keeping far from the corners of their psychic visions.  _ That  _ was something he’d not risk, tangling with left-behind creatures who had formed their own court in the absence of the ones who had gone underhill. That was how banishings happened, and Jiang was feeling too lucky in Henrietta to risk  _ that.  _

K was delicious because of his power, because of the inhuman glint in his veins, but mostly because he was so  _ alone,  _ so vulnerable. An easy target. 

Prokopenko had been heavenbound, had prayed before bed every night even if he’d spent the evening doing lines and bloodying his knuckles for K’s benefit. He’d called his grandmother every Saturday and done his own fucking laundry at a laundromat in town instead of taking advantage of the in-dorm cleaning service. 

The loss of his sparkling soul was a stinging thing to the hungriest part of Jiang, but there was something satisfying in bringing back a shadow of the boy to be thoroughly debauched by all of K’s  _ worst _ fantasies. The real Prokopenko had been well-aware of K’s desires, and his own, but had been too afraid of damnation to  _ do  _ something about it. Instead, he died a virgin in a strange land, unaware that he could’ve been fucked every single day by K and still been a shoe-in for the pearly gates. 

Some people were just  _ like that.  _

K got cagier by the day, pacing like a half-tamed lion. Waiting for death. Filling the void with sex, drugs, cars, and Ronan Lynch. 

Ronan was another one of those annoyingly-pure souls, even with the magic he wielded, even with the anger in his heart so thick that Jiang almost got a stomachache devouring the dregs of it, too-sweet, syrupy-rich. 

_ (Oh,  _ how Jiang wished to be an angel again, if only for a night, just to feel the unparalleled pleasure of receiving one of Ronan Lynch’s prayers. He was like a modern day saint, dripping holiness like golden ichor, making miracles appear like so many half-formed wishes.) 

Skov and Swan were fun enough, egging on K, playing fast and loose with rules and laws of both nature and man, growing metaphorically fat on the spoils of K’s war against… well,  _ everyone.  _ Jiang liked to watch them fuck each other in new and interesting (to them) ways, liked to watch them greedily swallow whatever novel pills K concocted, liked to see their pupils contract and their breathing speed up as their bodies tried to decide if enough was enough, even as their brains lit up with fireworks, fizzling pleasure mingled with numbing waves of blessed unconsciousness. 

He liked all of that, but— Ronan Lynch was a  _ saint.  _

K was a wildfire, the conflicted boy rapidly dissolving into a blackhole of sadism and greed and fear. 

Prokopenko was a spun-sugar sex doll animated with only Jiang’s absent-minded perversion. 

All of these playthings he’d grown mostly-bored of, and yet no one else in Henrietta caught Jiang’s eye. 

No one but  _ Declan.  _

Declan Lynch, as he’d been named this time around, born of man and dream. 

Declan, whose shoulders were straight like arrow shafts and whose eyes were the same as they always had been. In every iteration,  _ Declan _ was the same. 

Jiang was the chameleon, the shapeshifter, the  _ snake.  _

Declan, who clearly had been sent to watch over Ronan, and who  _ clearly  _ was pained by the contract binding Kavinsky, a blackstrap molasses scent in the air around his rapidly-deteriorating form. 

(The nightmares had come, in these last months. Kavinsky’s appetite had dwindled. He spent all his time chasing Ronan around Henrietta, ignoring his infernal playthings. It did not offend Jiang— he draped the false Prokopenko over his own shoulders like a prized mink and sat back to watch the show unfold.) 

Declan tried to forbid Ronan from contact with the aspiring drug kingpin of Henrietta— Jiang wanted to press himself all along Declan’s front and murmur about how it was all gonna end in a couple months anyway, he should let Ronan have his  _ fun. _

_ Oh.  _

“Michael,” he whispered, like he’d once hissed the word, whenever he found himself within hearing distance of Declan Lynch, who tried to smother down his full-body twitches in response, like he was resisting electrocution. 

_ Oh.  _ He’d  _ missed  _ this. 

Michael had watched him, always- when his eyes were not watching God, he was watching Lucifer. Watching the Morningstar, the most beautiful of all the angels. His beauty had not faded in the millenia since the Fall- with each brokered soul and borrowed skinsuit, Lucifer only became  _ more  _ beautiful. More terrible.  _ More, more, more.  _

The Fourth reminded him of a passion play, a romanticized version of the war between Heaven and Hell. In that field among the bodies of frenzied berserkers stuffing themselves full of poison, Jiang watched behind a dispassionate mask as the boys he’d collected for their sooty-black souls spun themselves out. 

He was everywhere; he was laid along K’s shoulders like a glittering mantle. He was in the lungs of Ronan Lynch’s most beloved dreamthing, tucked away and frightened in the trunk of a gleaming white deathtrap. He was in every last thread of Declan Lynch’s expensive suit jacket, far away in Alexandria. 

He was everywhere and nowhere, dissolving and corporeal. 

K was  _ dying,  _ and his soul was leeching out of his decaying body. Wisps of it came to Jiang like handfuls of sticky cotton candy, more and more until there was no soul left inside the flesh-and-bone prison that it had once called home.

Everyone was screaming, later, when the body was discovered. 

Not Jiang. He was practically  _ purring.  _ K had not gone anywhere. He was tucked inside Jiang’s gut, alongside all the others he’d plucked personally from the mortal coil with the promise of their heart’s desire. He stood next to Skov and Swan at the funeral, faking sadness. Looked up to see the eldest two Lynches beneath a shared umbrella, standing at the very edge of the cemetery. 

Jiang licked his lips, suddenly ravenous when his eyes met Declan’s. 

_ Michael,  _ he made the willow trees whisper. 

Declan stiffened, and his eyes were hard. 

_ Oh.  _

The action in Henrietta had not yet played out; one dreamer was dead, and the other was guarded by an archangel. The place was crawling with youth, with the bruised souls of these terrible princes of industry, of politics, of crime. A town like an apple tree, fruit over-ripened, ready to be plucked. To be  _ devoured.  _

Jiang would stay.  Jiang would  _ wait. _

***

_ live and learn _

_ or die, _

_ and teach by example.  _

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me @ brophigenia.tumblr.com


End file.
